Plut. Mor., Pythian Oracles in Verse 17 — Wherefore the Pythian Priestess Now Ceases to Deliver her Oracles in Verse

Plut. Mor., Pythian Oracles in Verse 17 — Wherefore the Pythian Priestess Now Ceases to Deliver her Oracles in Verse, Plutarch; served verbatim

Now as Serapio was about to have added something of the same nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth, said: I am wonderfully pleased to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but I am constrained to claim your first promise, to tell me the reason wherefore now the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers and measures. And therefore, if you please, we will surcease the remaining sight of these curiosities, choosing rather to sit a while and discourse the matter among ourselves. For it seems to be an assertion strangely repugnant to the belief and credit of the oracle, in regard that of necessity one of these two things must be true, either that the Pythian prophetess does not approach the place where the deity makes his abode, or that the sacred vapor that inspired her is utterly extinct, and its efficacy lost. Walking therefore to the south side of the temple, we took our seats within the portico, over against the temple of Tellus, having from thence a prospect of the Castalian fountain; insomuch that Boethus presently told us that the very place itself favored the stranger’s question. For formerly there stood a temple dedicated to the Muses, close by the source of the rivulet, whence they drew their water for the sacrifices, according to that of Simonides: There flows the spring, whose limpid stream supplies The fair-haired Muses water for their hands, Before they touch the hallowed sacrifice. And the said Simonides a little lower calls Clio somewhat more curiously The chaste inspectress of those sacred wells, Whose fragrant water all her cisterns fills; Water, through dark ambrosial nooks conveyed, By which Castalian rivulets are fed. And therefore Eudoxus erroneously gave credit to those that gave the epithet of Stygian to this water, near which the wiser sort placed the temple of the Muses, as guardians of the springs and assistants to prophecy; as also the temple of Tellus, to which the oracle appertained, and where the answers were delivered in verses and songs. And here it was, as some report, that first a certain heroic verse was heard to this effect: Ye birds, bring hither all your plumes; Ye bees, bring all your wax; which related to the time that the oracle, forsaken by the Deity, lost its veneration.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Boethus — a candidate entry Clio — a candidate entry Deity — a candidate entry Eudoxus — a candidate entry Serapio — a candidate entry Simonides — a life

Wherefore the Pythian Priestess Now Ceases to Deliver her Oracles in Verse, Plutarch — translated by John Philips (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)